Thanks to the careful work of conservators, the squatting man can be clearly seen doing his business once again.

The van Ostade isn’t the first Dutch painting in the royal family’s collection to have had such a touch-up: restorers replaced the offending image of a man pulling down his pants to expose his butt with a bull’s head on a tavern sign in Jan Steen’s A Village Revel (1674).

“Dutch artists often include people or animals answering the call of nature partly as a joke and partly to remind viewers of that crucial word ‘nature,’ the inspiration for their art,” said Desmond Shawe-Taylor, surveyor of the Queen’s pictures and curator of the exhibition, in a statement. “Queen Victoria thought the Dutch pictures in her collection were painted in a ‘low style;’ two years after her death perhaps a royal advisor felt similarly.”